TFW your site is accidentally valuable, or: why sponsored posts now?

You’ll have seen the news: I have made the hard but necessary decision to open up FlickFilosopher.com to sponsored content.

I want to stress to you, my dear readers, that this will be on an extremely limited and highly selective basis. I despair of how cluttered the web has gotten with advertising, and worse, disguised advertising. I vow to you that I will never run more than one sponsored post per week, and that these posts will always be clearly and obviously labeled as sponsored. These posts will be discrete from my film (and occasional TV) reviews — my reviews will never be sponsored — and they will never feature anything scummy or scammy, like cryptocurrency or “AI.”

For years now, I’ve been getting multiple emails every day from marketers hoping to place sponsored posts at FlickFilosopher.com. They come in more frequently all the time, because with each passing year, FlickFilosopher.com becomes more and more valuable as digital real estate. You won’t find many domains that are older, and even fewer that are still active and still pursuing their original missions. FlickFilosopher.com is considered high-quality not just because of how frankly awesome my film criticism is, but because of its age. A link at my site — from any domain with a deep history — to somewhere else online is incredibly authoritative to Google and Bing and other search engines, which is precious to the business the link points to. (Flick Filosopher is actually a year older than Google.)

As film criticism seems to be losing its value, I don’t have much other choice but to take advantage of this desirability of the site I’ve built over nearly three decades. (Not that I’m going to stop writing film criticism!) I promise that I will minimize the impact of any sponsored content to you as much as possible. And, honestly, I may not even have many takers: I have priced access to my incredibly valuable digital real estate appropriately high, and it might be too rich for most.

We’ll see how it goes. I welcome your feedback on this now or at any point once — if — it takes off.